Ghani Won 2014 Election Based on Fraudulent Votes: Finding

According to research conducted by the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies (AISS), President Ashraf Ghani has not won the 2014 Presidential Election based on clean votes.

The research paper titled “The Myth of Afghan Electoral Democracy: The Irregularities of the 2014 Presidential Election” is written by American Professor Thomas H. Johnson who a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the AISS.

This research systematically assesses the 2014 Afghanistan Presidential Election using provincial voting data as well and explicit data from polling centers. 

Based on this research paper, during the second round of the 2014 elections, a large number of fraudulent votes were casted in favor of President Ashraf Ghani in certain provinces where he had fewer votes during the first round of election compared to his rival Abdullah Abdullah, who later become the Chief Executive of the National Unity Government which was brokered by the former State Secretary of the United States John Kerry.

Findings also reveal that the election commission had paved the way for systematic fraud in favor of Ghani at that time.

Speaking via a video call, Professor Johnson on Thursday said that the entire Afghan electoral system must be recalibrated and the and the best result of the 2014 Afghan Presidential Election is to draw lessons from it and these lessons should serve as an immediate mandate for changing a badly flawed system for instance; the Afghan voter registration process has to be completely revamped etc.

At the event, Davood Ali Najafi, former chief of the (IEC) secretariat said that we should learn lessons from the past and bring reform to the election system as it is the only solution for holding more democratic election.

Naeem Ayoubzada, Head of Transparent Election Foundation of Afghanistan (TEFA) said that based on their observations, the percentage of fraud and electoral violations have increased in 2018 when compared with the year 2014 election.

This comes as the Afghan presidential election is scheduled to be held on July 20. It was originally scheduled for April 20, but later it was delayed after problems raised in using a biometric system and finalizing results of Afghan parliamentary elections.